Weeknotes 231

GOOD NEWS: I managed seven consecutive days of 6am-ish trips to the gym before taking a break at the weekend to ride my bike instead. In any case I’m consistently closing my rings™ and that feels good. My foot’s holding up fine so far.

BAD NEWS: I picked a busy time to adopt a fitness routine. Getting up early every day without adjusting my bedtime to compensate — plus, I suppose, expending more energy than usual — was exhausting and left me in a bit of a daze all week. In a completely unrelated turn of events I broke something at work by accident, which felt bad and briefly stressful, but I fixed it again quickly so there’s no harm beyond the self-inflicted trauma.

NEUTRAL NEWS: Despite exercising and eating carefully I have lost zero kilograms. A bit discouraging after putting the effort in, but also, maybe it’s fine‽

I received lots of positive reader feedback on last week’s #satisfying #gutter #content. Noted!

On Wednesday I saw Cherry Glazerr at Village Underground. It was a good show but, as usual, the behaviour of a few randos came close to spoiling it for me.

It‘s impossible to tell the difference between “other people are getting ruder and more entitled” and “I’m getting grumpier and less tolerant”. The result is the same: I fear my gig-going days are numbered.

Also, gigs are less fun when you’re knackered.

Today I met Leo, Sophie and Chris for lunch. We’d planned to eat at Jam Delish but they didn’t have any food so that didn’t work out. We went to Mildred’s instead, which gave me the opportunity to bike to Camden and relive the glory of my FutureLearn commute. Fortunately the layout and menu have improved since 2019 so I didn’t have to also relive any of my work lunches.

I can’t believe I failed to mark the ten-year anniversary of The DHH Problem, simultaneously my most popular talk and the one I put the least effort into, which would teach me an important lesson if I thought about it, which I shan’t.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about it; sort of proud, sort of ashamed. It’s a topic I feel strongly about so I’m glad I stood up there and said something, but I knocked the slides together in my hotel room shortly beforehand and that lack of care definitely shows. The titular problem — a community’s willingness to disproportionately and uncritically elevate any one person’s opinion — is poorly communicated and not made explicit, which leaves too much room for misinterpretation and rubbed some fanboys the wrong way at the time.

Still, it’s gratifying that people enjoy and occasionally reference it a decade later. Regrettably its content has aged well and remains relevant.

I watched most of the first series of We Are Lady Parts. It’s good. It’s breezy and joyful and it strikes the right balance between not taking itself too seriously and not trying too hard to be silly. It’s got a clear, confident authorial voice which makes it easy for me to relax and enjoy it. It’s not that funny but it’s charming enough to keep me smiling and I’m enjoying the peek into the lives and problems of people who aren’t exactly like me. I’ll keep going with it.

I thought Simon Anthony’s solve of Counting Calories on Thursday was one of the more interesting videos that’s appeared on Cracking The Cryptic recently. The solution required a satisfying mix of meta-level reasoning and good honest sudoku.

To make it easier to keep track of exercise I puzzled out how to get my watch’s action button to start & end workouts. It’s more fiddly than expected because of some of the constraints (e.g. a shortcut can’t directly detect whether a workout is currently active) but I did get something working:

1. I enabled the “Fitness” focus and configured it to turn on automatically when I start a workout, which implicitly turns it off again when that workout ends

2. I made a “Toggle workout” shortcut which either starts or ends a workout depending on whether the name of the current focus is “Fitness”

3. I enabled “Show on Apple Watch” for that shortcut and, on my watch, assigned it to the action button

4. I made automations to end a workout whenever I arrive at work or home

Once I was confident this was reliable, I updated the shortcut to choose a different workout depending on whether I’m within 0.1 mystery distance units of my gym (indoor walk for one hour) or not (outdoor cycle with open goal). So now when I get onto the treadmill or bike I just press the button and the right kind of workout starts automatically, then I press the button again when I’ve finished — or, if I’m commuting, let it end automatically when I arrive. Pretty good.

I thought the search page looked acceptable when I added it, but then time passed and I tried it in the evening and discovered it was basically unusable in dark mode. So I copied the dark mode CSS from the docs, plonked it inside my existing prefers-color-scheme media query, and I reckon it’s serviceable now.